Central to Malabou's philosophy is the concept of "plasticity," which she derives in part from the work of
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, but also from medical science, for example, from work on
stem cells and from the concept of
neuroplasticity. In 1999, Malabou published
Voyager avec Jacques Derrida – La Contre-allée, co-authored with Derrida. Her book,
Les nouveaux blessés (2007), concerns the intersection between
neuroscience,
psychoanalysis, and philosophy, thought through the phenomenon of
trauma. Coinciding with her exploration of neuroscience has been an increasing commitment to political philosophy. This is first evident in her book
What Should We Do With Our Brain? and continues in
Les nouveaux blessés, as well as in her book on feminism (
Changer de différence, le féminin et la question philosophique, Galilée, 2009), and in her forthcoming book about the homeless and social emergency (
La grande exclusion, Bayard). Malabou is co-writing a book with
Adrian Johnston on affects in Descartes, Spinoza and neuroscience, and is preparing a new book on the political meaning of life in the light of the most recent biological discoveries (mainly
epigenetics). The latter work will discuss
Giorgio Agamben's concept of "bare life" and
Michel Foucault's notion of
biopower, underscoring the lack of scientific biological definitions of these terms, and the political meaning of such a lack. In May 2022, Edinburgh University Press published the first authorized collection of Malabou's shorter writings, entitled
Plasticity: The Promise of Explosion (ed. Tyler M. Williams with an introduction by Ian James). In February 2026 she received an honorary doctorate from
Leiden University. == Bibliography ==